Sunday, July 20, 2008

Oh joy, another comic reminding us that if we have not chosen a hard science as a field of study, we are stupid. Good thing too, because it's been more than a month since his last reminder.

Which isn't to say it isn't funny. The set up and punchline work pretty well, and the "total idiot lost in the world he is in" is a reliable trope (see: Borat) which is done well in the first three panels.

But it's kind of juvenile and insulting. Randall Munroe doesn't understand literary criticism, and so he thinks it's stupid and easy to fake. Ok. I don't understand it either, but I don't understand math. You could easily make this same comic with some complicated equation in the last panel and I would find it just as funny. A math person wouldn't, just as to a literary person panel 4 is total BS (I can only assume...). Randall really, with this comic, is not saying "literary criticism and related fields are BS" so much as "I don't understand them so they must be BS" which is pretty dumb.

I say this as a person who once very foolishly took a course called "Media Aesthetics" and did, in fact learn about Derrida and Deconstructionism. Well I didn't learn it, the teacher attempted to teach it, but as far as I am concerned, failed. I am a social science person. But I know it's not really science. I am, however, a social science person who thinks it probably is possible to rank people from best to worst, approximately.

Also - does anyone else find the tiny little hands in the comic, especially in panel 3, really freaky and weird? update: Credit where it's due, this was not an original observation but something pointed out on the forums.

38 comments:

It's a common attitude amoung math, science, and computer science people. As you correctly observed it stems from "not getting it" which is expressed as mockery. (Expressed as mockery because, since they don't get it, they have to make fun of it or admit that they don't understand it. And for people who value being, and especially seeming, intelligent so highly that is the last thing they are willing to do.) And the reason that they don't get it is because the "paradigm" is too different; in such fields there aren't right or wrong answers and the process is often more important than the conclusion. Science people can't get their heads around that for some reason. And yet humanities & arts people usually don't have a problem appreciating science (although some, the extreme crazy relativists, do).

From what I know of literary criticism, panel 4 is an arguable point, maybe even a truism. "The deconstruction is inextricable from the text" seems to be roughly Derrida, and any reading is subjective, so the bit about the self can be argued.

On the first comment: it seems that in a field with no "right or wrong answers" it would take considerably longer to tell if someone is talking out their ass. Just saying. Actually, it seems like it would make the bullshit considerably harder to filter out in general.

Anyway, here's an interesting take on lit crit by a computer professional who took the time to study it.

You are still thinking in terms of right or wrong. If there is no right or wrong there can be no bullshit. Even if you generated your writing randomly it wouldn't be bullshit (although it might be disingenuous). The goal is to produce in the reader some ineffable insight, not to be correct. Of course a piece generated randomly is unlikely to generate that insight, but then again most writers can't intentionally produce such a piece either.

Compare the field to a zen koan. Can a koan be right or wrong? No. But not every koan is equally likely to lead to enlightenment. There is no such thing as a bullshit koan, even though many of them are nonsensical.

With that said I am a feirce opponent of postmodernism, because I think that their "creative" use of terminology hinders more than it helps.

Literary theory is pretty rad, but Randall's not entirely wrong here. In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal submitted a parody essay called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" to the cultural-studies journal "Social Text." (I leave it to the reader to decide which of these titles - "Transgressing the Boundaries etc. etc." or "Social Text" - is sillier.) The essay (which you can read here) is nonsense from almost any perspective, but it gets a lot of the jargon right. What's more, (according to Sokal), it flatters the editors' ideological position. In any case, they published it. It may not be eight papers and two books... but still. Yikes.

Now, the offending journal was not peer-reviewed, which makes it a little less reputable to begin with. Also, it's important to note that Sokal did not actually writing a fake cultural-criticism paper: he wrote a fake philosophy-of-science paper that appropriated the jargon of cultural criticism. So the comic's characterization of the issue isn't quite accurate. The editors of Social Text probably would have realized that Sokal wasn't an expert in literary criticism if he'd just submitted a commentary on S/Z or whatever. Their sins lie in the fact that they failed to consider the possibility that he wasn't an expert in theoretical physics. (Not that Sokal isn't an expert - but if they had considered that possibility, and run the paper by some other physicists, the fraud would likely have been detected.)

Nevertheless, as an amateur deconstructionist, I can't help but wince at the fact that Sokal's prank essay was accepted. Literary theory has earned some mockery of this kind. The discipline probably NEEDS some mockery, actually, just to help keep everyone honest.

I do wonder that the mockery is coming from this particular artist, though. In many ways, this speaks to the core of the postmodern project.

Oh, and Pat is totally right about the line in panel 4. It's far from BS. But it's not exactly an interesting statement either. The response of a lit-crit graduate student wouldn't be rapt attention, but rather "Wow, did you come up with that all by yourself? Run along now, I have cloves to smoke."

Well, the response if Randall Munroe actually tried to do this would be "Dude, are you even out of college yet? Get out of my library cubicle I have a dissertation to write."

Anyway it's so nice to see some debate here in the comments. I have added to the original post that the hand thing was pointed out on the forums, I didn't discover it myself.

All I will add to the debate is that Alan Sokal getting a totally BS paper printed in "Social Text" seems to say a lot about the standards at "Social Text" and very little about deconstruction/literary criticism/the humanities in general. Did they have any prestige in the field beforehand? I wonder what a respected philosopher would say to the article if they were to read it not knowing the story behind it.

You've been deconstructing how xkcd sucks for how long now? And you seem like an expert to me, at least, even if you're not lecturing down to us from a comfy chair.

Could there be an implied comment about each academic discipline in the panels? The others sit in chairs or speak in the hall like colleagues, but the lit. student chills on the floor and seems to accept what he's told.

Can we add a panel 5 of him babbling about String Theory or upper-level "two plus two doesn't always equal five" bullcrappery?

I have been deconstructing xkcd in the sense that I have been overanalyzing it; is that the same as Deconstruction the complicated literary technique? I don't think it is. But I don't know.

I suspect that the talking-down-from-a-chair thing was more to show that in the field of literary criticism, the character was able to rise to a point of respect, where he could teach those below him. The panel takes place however many years into his faked-career, when grad students worship every word he says.

Maybe it's because I'm a writer and not a scholar of literary criticism, but I often get the impression a lot of lit scholars have no idea what they are talking about. There reaches a point at which you're no longer talking about what someone has written and you're talking about what you've read. Maybe that's the point, I don't know.

I do know that one of the most important skills I've ever picked up in the world of academia is the ability to convince people I know what I'm talking. Making definitive statements, citing sources copiously where appropriate. The difference between myself and many students is, I think, I am often doing it at least slightly disingenuously.

We have long passed the point where I even have a vague idea what I am talking about, so I will just add that a smart person once told me that you can usually jump into any conversation by saying "Bue where do you draw the line?" I am not sure that this would work.

As a CS type, I've taken the minimal ammount of Lit classes needed, and there is a very clear trend in grades on papers of this sort. Lit majors consistantly get higher grades. The problem is that if you look at the actual papers you'll notice that almost everyone that scores a B or higher gets close to the same marks in the area of content. Lit majors just do a lot better in the grammer format and general presentation areas. Granted this is only at the junior college level, but seeing as Randell is a College student (still? or has he graduated) the comic holds up to reason. The being said it would've been better if a less obvious field was picked.

basically he is saying "in the low-level Lit Classes For Complete Dumbasses" he had to take in college, he didn't do as well on the papers as the actual lit students, but the only reason for that is this was Literature For Complete Dumbasses, where everyone with a functioning brain can write a good essay, and it is literary-minded individuals who tend to do the best because they also know proper spelling and grammar, which he does not.

Bah, this is the comic that started to get me very angry with XKCD, sure I do philosophy and English Language at uni, but I'd like to see Randall come even close to scratching the surface. I'm not a very good programmer. I don't work for NASA. I would still kick his arse in an intellectual debate on ethics, language and even some parts of biology and evolution. So don't talk down to us because we don't do what you do.

My Hobby: sitting down with webcartoonists and timing how long it takes them to realise that I have no artistic talent:Ctrl+Alt+Del: 12 secondsLittle Gamers: 45 secondsCyanide & Happiness: 4 minutesXKCD: 200 Hangman games and he still hasn't caught on.

God I hate this comic. I majored in both philosophy and physics (Alan Sokal was my prof. at one point; i had to read his paper..he's a very nice guy whose wife is like Brazilian or something). So I can't help but feel that Randy is hopelessly biased. Meh.

No, it says the "advanced mathematics" may be unsuitable for liberal arts majors. Letting aside that 3 of the 7 liberal arts are considered elements of "mathematics" (check it out, bitches!), the point is, there is no advanced mathematics in this comic and there almost never is any in any part of xkcd. What there is is advanced "thinking math makes you better than other people"

Actually I have to agree with Randall on this one. The jab at sociology might be a bit undeserved, but the literary criticism thing is right on.

I've written a lot papers (on books that I haven't read) in a couple of hours and still got Bs most of the time. You really just need to look at the plot summary and scan through the book for a few adjectives that stick out to you and you can generally create a pretty coherent criticism.

Nerd culture's demonization of the liberal arts (and by that it means anything that doesn't involve doing things with numbers) has always baffled me. OK, so it's alright to be obsessed with Newtonian physics, but not the works of Vladimir Nabokov? Just because a field doesn't deal in absolute truths (which don't exist IRL, dinguses) doesn't make it any less viable. Sure, an English major doesn't have a good chance at making a lot of money doing boring things, but what's inherently wrong about a Best Buy employee who spends his free time with T.S. Eliot?

SMBC did a great parody of this in which an engineer and a philosopher have a debate and both are made fun of.

Caveat: I study literature on the graduate level, although as an undergraduate I mostly focused on political science and philosophy. In high school, I was good at (and enjoyed) advanced math and physics; I just lost interest in them after a while.

I wish that I better understood advanced science these days. I still find most scientific disciplines to be fascinating and exciting. I have a good deal of respect for those who pursue them.

That said, it's simply not true that, as this comic and others above suggest, the humanities consist in a collection of ever more intricate mystifications and obfuscations that we magicians use to bewitch right-thinking, logical people into paying our salaries. Think about it: that's what this comic implies, coming from a self-identified (and apparently rather proud) "scientist" -- me no understand your mouth-words, you dumb, I smart.

It's the same kind of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism that threatens science, that makes a lawyer think he can trump Darwin and Dawkins with something called "Intelligent Design," or a weatherman with a Doppler radar think he can debunk climate science as "voodoo." This is not to say that there exists no B.S. in academia. Having quite a few scientist friends in graduate school, I know that it also exists in the sciences. It doesn't matter whether you study physics or Renaissance art: the money flows to the top, and at the top are people who are popular, powerful, or both.

One need glance only very briefly at what passes for an understanding of humanism in the sciences to know that most scientists, young ones and students especially, have a poor grasp of things like politics, ethics, philosophy, and so on. Smart (and not merely competent) ones tend to nevertheless have an appreciation for them. Math is fundamentally logical, but only as a closed system; mathematical logic cannot be transposed to rhetorical (or, more generally speaking, philosophical) logic. The only thing that this comic proves is that Randall does not understand the difference between science and humanism. It takes a while to identify charlatanism in the humanities precisely because there are very few axioms to which one might turn; I could not simply cite a formula that disproves the statement 'Deconstruction is inextricable from [...] the self', although on its own it does appear to be nonsense -- because it is. None of the terms are defined, and there's no rhetorical context, even if the "eight papers and two books" are implied in the supposed punchline. Is this ghostly statement meant to unmask literary criticism as a fraud? For me, it simply says that Randall doesn't know much about it, or that he only knows enough to vaguely mimick the style, sort of like me writing, "Science is stupid. 'Excited Subnomial Particulate Matter: Quantum Plasma States.' What kind of a paper title is that? Fucking science, how does it work?" Any scientist would be able to read that as nonsense: just me using words that sound "scientific," much in the same way that Randall uses words that sound "literary" -- the principle difference is that I know that I'm not an expert, whereas he thinks that he is.

He can snigger and giggle like a buffoon all he wants; challenged to actually cite exactly what it is that he finds to be so lamentably sophomoric about literary criticism, I suspect he'd be at a loss for words. Judging from his work, it would probably do him well to read a book or two.

This is why I stopped reading XKCD a long time ago. When it comes down to it, Randall is neither smart nor witty, just a self-obsessed twat. His fans aren't much better.

Also: to those of you saying, "I didn't even try and still got Bs," a 'B' is not a good grade in a literature class. It's not like an orgo final where you're docked a half-point for every error. A 'B' says: "this isn't a very good paper, but it's written in English." People who go on in literary studies don't get Bs.

Although much of the above discussion was interesting and enlightening, some of the "lit" people have taken this comic a weeee bit too personally. There have been some extravagant assumptions made about the content of the comic and the intentions of the author, both of which are unnecessary.

If it makes you feel better, don't read the comic, but I also wouldn't start crying because you're a lit major/grad student and "Mistah Wandall said somefing mean about witerature cwiticizm!" Acting so indignant and hurt only makes you look insecure in your discipline...as though deep down you suspect Randall is actually right. That's probably not entirely true, but probably not entirely false. Either way I suspect you and lit-dom will survive.

It's not the lit people's fault you read too much into what they're saying--maybe if you were a lit student you would be better at reading comprehension? Nobody's feelings are hurt. We're just attacking Randall's blatant ignorance.

It's something science people do all the time, especially the Out And Proud nerds. They attack people for being ignorant. It is, indeed, one of the great pastimes of the internet.

In this particular case, Randall is merely reflecting the widespread belief, common among science assholes, that these fields are incredibly easy to fake your way through, and that any science person could write compelling theses and pass himself off as a lit student. This misconception is based on the Lit Classes For Complete Dumbasses that science people take, and do fairly well in, because they speak passable English. Wikipedia also contributes.

This is an incredibly annoying misconception--not because of hurt feelings, but because science people are actually pretty inept at this sort of thing, and it's annoying when they act as if they have some sort of meaningful literary skill.

Having studied lit crit at the postgraduate level, it IS easy to fake, because it's completely and utterly devoid of content. I essentially spent several years doing field research on the field, and found that marks were inversely proportional to any textual basis for one's assertions (the best marks consistently went to those who had at most read the back-cover blurb of whatever reading was assigned), and that even those who taught the material professionally had trouble taking it seriously.

That's why a random word generator can get published in a peer-reviewed journal in this field, and why one of the main academic responses to a journal article ("Against Theory" from the mid 1980s) pointing this out was not to defend literary "theory", but to say that pointing out the hollowness and standardlessness of the discipline would cost jobs in the age of budget cuts in the humanities.

When this particular XKCD comic came out, I distributed it in my department, and it was a hit (sample: 30 M.A. and PhD lit "theory" students and faculty from about as many countries and prior institutional affiliations).

I just want to correct Overthinking It re: Sokal. What Sokal did was to abuse the trust of the editors of a magazine he already knew wasn't peer-reviewed by insisting they publish his nonsense against their better judgment. They even asked him to revise it, but he refused.

Everyone jumps on Social Text for not being peer-reviewed, but why should they have been? Is there some law I don't know about?

There are some really important criticisms of postmodernism that can be made, but Sokal's hoax is not one of them.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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